Spills Out

The sprawling third album from the Brooklyn post-punks bristles with basement-show energy one minute, haunting Zombies-style harmonies the next. For the most part, Spills Out manages to revel in its own clutter.

Focus too long on any one part of Spills Out, the third LP from psych-splattered Brooklynite post-punk manglers Pterodactyl, and you risk losing track of the rest of it. The sprawling set from the shapeshifting band is bristling with basement-show energy one minute, stacking haunting Zombies-style harmonies the next. The pixelated, post-everything whoosh of their earlier, more forceful records is still very much in evidence on Spills Out, but it's as though their turn-on-a-dime cubism's been given the SpinArt treatment, globs of melody pooling at its edges. This unlikely meetup-- of Les Savy Fav's hard-driving antsiness, the Olivia Tremor Control's echoing psych-pop, Abe Vigoda's clangy hot-weather punk, and any three or four second-tier SST bands of your choosing-- sometimes smacks of eclectic overextension, but for the most part, Spills Out manages to revel in its own clutter.

Spills Out's first five numbers are all about propulsion, zig-zagging melodies and breathless vocals underpinned by insistent, edge-of-calamity drumbeats. This, in large part, is the art-punking Pterodactyl of old, never ones to shy away from melody, provided they can make it move. At times, the vigorous rhythms threaten to get the best of the trickily constructed tunes they're mobilizing, but at this pace, they leave precious little time to notice. The woozy lurch of "Allergy Shots" is quite a toneshift, its duskily triumphant melody marching its way directly into your pituitary region. Though 2010's Arnold's Park saw Pterodactyl playing around with psychedelia-- the acoustic flitters of Sung Tongs-era Animal Collective, among other things-- here, Spills Out burrows its way into the rabbit hole on something of a mid-album mini-suite of thick, woozy psych.

Rife with spectral sound effects and blurry, tape-stressing maximalism, many of these songs could've fallen off the back end of last year's stellar Olivia Tremor Control reissues. Like the Olivias, Pterodactyl wrest cohesion from calamity by soldiering surefootedly through all these far-flung juxtapositions, presenting these disparate styles as though they're supposed to go together. But even on the sprightlier numbers, Pterodactyl's formidable instrumental prowess sometimes blots out the songs themselves; with tempos slowed and melodies pushed to the forefront rather than rattling around the edges, they're downplaying their strengths in favor of an experiment that proves only somewhat successful.

When, as on "The Break", they match the two sides together-- its drums rollicking, its harmonies circuitous-- Pterodactyl's messy vision for Spills Out is given its clearest expression. For the most part, the record's final third does a nice job blending the two, squeezing little bits of baroque-bent vocalism or sci-fi sound collage in between the pummels. Their knack for jittery melody's always fared best when matched to forward motion, and though much of Spills Out seems to zip by in a blur, it's assembled with enough care to never quite spin out from its center. It can be more than a little dizzying, with all that stuff whizzing by, to settle on any particular chorus or guitar riff for too long. But throwing yourself in Spills Out's path means letting it reconfigure your circuits, and it's hard to come out the other side not feeling pretty good about getting frazzled.